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Bob Brown

James Lovelock is a ‘big idea’ type, most successful with his Gaia extrapolation (1976), although it certainly is not universally accepted by all top scientists. He is not a hard scientist. His specialty is medicine, and chemistry, where he has contributed significantly. He understands very little about geophysicalfluiddynamics. I read his book in the ‘70s […]
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After 3-years of reading GW denial material, I’m entertaining the idea that it might be God’s Plan for the planet. (I’m thinking of an Einstein definition of God, a force behind everything, that is beyond our ken.) First, we note that God sent his troops forth in the GW denial movement; it is religious in […]
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Some observations from just this week. One, the honchos behind GW denying are moderating their tone: From Shell.com; “We were one of the first energy companies to acknowledge the threat of climate change. We are calling for action by governments, our industry and energy users. And we play a leading role in demonstrating ways to […]
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“Natural gas” is mostly methane (CH4), a relatively potent greenhouse gas. The concentration of methane in the Earth’s atmosphere is expressed as a mole fraction, nmol/mol (parts per billion, ppb). It was about 700 ppb in 1750; in 1998, it was 1745; it stayed flat for awhile but then began rising, to over 1850 ppb […]
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There is much lamentation these days about the extremes in politics, in our culture and in our individual choices and preferences. We also talk about extremes in our weather, possible climate changes and the general mathematics of fluid flow (atmosphere or ocean e.g.). I have studied fluid dynamic turbulence, defined as random, unpredictable flow patterns, […]
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Atmospheric Scientists study the weather & climate, looking for periodic variations that can be linked to some geophysical cause. Then we can understand and predict. The first solar cycle noticed (other than the diurnal and the annual!) is the famous 11-year sunspot cycle. The sunspots are evident (Galileo saw them) and there is a change […]
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I slept on the multi-year pack ice in the high Arctic Ocean in the ‘70s when we had a large camp there for a year, called the Arctic Ice Dynamics Joint Experiment. The average ice thickness was about 10-feet then. The total extent of pack ice in the winter included the whole Arctic basin. A […]
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Evolution produced Homo sapiens and the ability to think, to figure out scientific reason and logical discussion. These became the foundation of the graduate schools, the academic societies, and the intellectual groups like Great Decisions, League of Woman Voters , Skeptics Society and others that collectively create the Ivory Tower. The individual who decided to […]
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This is a reply to a denier (R.C.): Thanks for your comment — I was beginning to fear that all the 50+ GW deniers that I’ve heard from over the past few years were scared (forced?) off by facebook publication. (Some suggested that there were probably 5 deniers with 10 pseudonyms each.) First, I doubt […]
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We’re all looking for negative feedbacks to climate change — effects that cause global cooling — some because they are worried about too much warming, and some just because it would be an easily publishable paper with maximum publicity! This has been proved with several such publications “test flown” in the literature, that embarrassingly for […]
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Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate..